It is unconscionable to teach about Minnesota history without keeping the suffering of the victims of genocide at the forefront of the conversation.
—Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like?, 2008, p. 76.
***
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Dakota War. That’s an episode in state history too formative to ignore and too ugly to examine without pain.
A few years ago, this column referred to the events in the Minnesota River valley in the summer of 1862. Reader response revealed that the famous William Faulkner line about the South—“the past isn’t over; it isn’t even past”—applies to Minnesota, too.
A mini-war erupted in my e-mail box, with descendants of people on each side of the conflict claiming that their side remains misunderstood and that facts remain in dispute.
(A passing aside to the Minnesota Historical Society and anyone else planning to publicly commemorate this year’s sad sesquicentennial: Good luck.) (Sturdevant, 2012)
Lori Sturdevant’s column concerned the recent election of the state’s first female Native-American state legislator, Susan Allen. It explained that “Allen, 48, is a member of the Yankton Sioux tribe. Some of her ancestors were in Minnesota during the Dakota War.” Allen’s election to office served as a sign of a step taken toward equality for Dakota people. Sturdevant continued, “I hope I’m standing watch sometime this session when she walks past the portrait of Gov. Alexander Ramsey, who ordered in the war’s wake that Sioux Indians be ‘driven forever beyond the borders of the state.’” For those familiar with the history, a troubling silence accompanied this part of the column. On September 9, 1862, Gov. Ramsey said, “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state” (Folwell, 1924, p. 255, emphasis mine).
I read Sturdevant’s self-censorship in the face of an e-mail inbox mini-war as a kind of parable for Chapters 3 and 4. Both chapters concern progressive notions of racial healing coinciding with evasion of direct talk about regional genocide. The present chapter focuses on how Dr. Lenz approached Waziyatawin’s history What Does Justice Look Like? with students, starting out with a narrative of healing but proceeding to establish frames for classroom discussion that enabled white-justice-as-fairness discourses and official J-term neutrality to prevail on a “situation of injustice,” to evoke Desmond Tutu’s dictum. As I introduce two notions of discursive frames and explain their role in establishing the terms by which classroom talk would transpire, I continue to build student profiles in an effort to make the politics of the Conflict and Remembrance J-term course thoroughly understood. The chapter ends with an expansion of my thesis, developing a picture of Minnesota’s civically imagined “balanced” educator as a privileged white aligned with the interests of historically oppressive white institutions.
***
Holly (on her work with Mitch) — “I mean, the only thing we ran into was like, ‘we don’t want white people to feel like they’re being attacked,’ but like, all we did was say the facts of what happened with the treaties.” (Interview, January 26, 2012)
Anna (on the peril for the instructors) — “Cause they have to like be so careful of the wording in what they present because they don’t want to like lose funding and piss anybody off.” (Interview, January 27, 2012)
Jennifer (on her own fears) — “Who am I more wary to, you know? Who am I stepping around because I don’t want to step on their toes? It’s white people. It’s- and, you know, and it’s the children of white people” (Interview, January 18, 2012).
As Lori Sturdevant wished them, Good luck indeed.
On the bright side, after four high-profile public lectures, only one message had tried to spark anything like a mini-war in the instructors’ e-mail boxes, a short complaint that took issue with the lecture-series speakers, or as the writer put it, “today’s Dahcotah sympathizers” who were “turning the history of events in the Minnesota River Valley in 1862, on its head” (E-mail correspondence, January 10, 2012).1 In line with Sturdevant’s recollection of disputed facts, this one portrayed speaker accounts as “factually-flawed” to the point of being “disturbing.” Yet it failed to identity any of those facts or explain how they might be disturbing or for whom. Beyond this lone rebuke came an overwhelmingly positive public response to the Conflict and Remembrance experience. Anonymous surveys left after each installment of the public lecture series, for example, reflected glowingly on the “interesting,” “excellent,” and “enlightening” proceedings, never once expressing defenses of neglected or misunderstood “sides.”2
By this final Tuesday of the class, regional media outlets such as the Mankato Free Press and Minnesota Monthly Magazine had expressed favorable interest in the course (Fieldnotes, January 12, 18, 20, 2012). A former Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives had telephoned Dr. Lenz to offer her personal encouragement (Fieldnotes, January 4, 2012). Importantly for Dr. Lenz, Dakota elders were touring the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS) in Gotland that very afternoon as she explained to the students, accounting for Mr. Harwell, the Director’s, absence. For her, the visit provided evidence of an important development in her often-stated purpose to create dialogue between Dakota and white communities long divided. As she said early on this day, “Engendering dialogue with Dakota people has been a goal all along. At every lecture, a Dakota person has stood up and talked. This has been precious in my mind” (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012). Dr. Lenz routinely announced all such positive events to the class since it had begun on January 3. Taking stock of favorable public response and developments in class like this built a sense over time that the Conflict and Remembrance J-term was not only getting things right despite the political peril, but also helping the region progress toward mutual healing.
Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (2008) was to provide the basis for reading and discussion on the Tuesday afternoon in question. Hers was the last of 6 books on the syllabus moving from Ella Deloria’s Waterlily (1988) through works the instructors considered foundational for students possessing little prior knowledge of the war such as Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan Woolworth’s Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of Minnesota’s Indian War of 1862 (1988) and Kenneth Carley’s The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (1976). Though three days remained on the syllabus, this discussion would mark an end to processing course content together as a whole class. The jam-packed itinerary simply would not allow for more group discussion. There were still two lectures to attend, a day-long field trip to Fort Snelling and the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul slated for Wednesday, small-group work with a visiting graphic designer on Thursday to set the final exhibit panel layouts, and a farewell gathering on Friday to celebrate a job well done. In order to observe the Waziyatawin discussion as both a culmination of their time together and occasion to reflect on hard-hitting material about ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Dakota people, Dr. Lenz brought in a wreath of sweetgrass. As she explained the previous Friday, passing the wreath and speaking only while holding it would offer a “Native-American pedagogical approach, allowing one to speak and be heard without being interrupted” (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Students would sit in a circle. Individuals would make a statement when the sweetgrass came their way, then pass it on and listen.
On Frames and What the Students Knew
Before delving into student talk that transpired that day, I want to take a step back and examine how the day’s discussion was framed, that is, set up within various contextual boundaries, some large and some small (Gee, 2011). By reading from Lori Sturdevant’s column warning that one should proceed with caution about the U.S.-Dakota War because the past is not past for war descendants, Dr. Lenz provided one large regional frame for the discussion to follow, a frame of caution and perhaps even anxiety or fear about offending descendants and setting off e-mail mini-wars. Referring to the Dakota elders’ visit to the local historical society established another, more local frame for discussion, suggesting that the public-service style project undertaken by the J-term class was helping to mend the long-standing racial divide between white towns like Gotland and Dakota communities like the Lower Sioux Indian Community near Morton, Minnesota where the day’s visitors had traveled from. Structuring the discussion in terms of nativistic ceremony, sitting in a circle and passing a wreath of sweetgrass, provided an even narrower classroom-level frame, setting students up to listen more than speak, to show mutual respect for what peers, Dr. Lenz, and Waziyatawin, a Dakota author, had to say, the latter if only in print. By invoking these various contextual levels, then, certain tones had been set—political caution, spiritual healing, mutual respect—all looking outward to various community levels and coming back again to shape the terms of classroom expression.
This last tone of mutual respect requires a bit more elaboration that will help nuance what I mean by frames. In Language and Power (2001), Norman Fairclough approaches frames in a slightly different sense than Gee’s contextual levels noting that specific frames themselves can figure as subject matter for activities and thereby play determinative roles for the particular scripts that unfold, scripts being the ways participants behave toward each other during the activity, the things they do and say and how they do and say them (p. 132). When reading through the course syllabus on the first day of class, Dr. Lenz established a kind of dichotomous frame for understanding Waziyatawin’s work in relation to Kenneth Carley’s (1976) history in particular, the latter volume chosen for its easy-to-follow chronology, maps, and illustrations, and its general overview of “the facts” on the war for the uninitiated (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). On top of this accessibility, Carley would offer “a fairly balanced perspective, which is what we’re looking for,” as Dr. Lenz explained to the students on the very first day of class (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). By contrast, Dr. Lenz introduced What Does Justice Look Like? that same day as “a radical, provocative book” that included strong suggestions for what modern Minnesotans should do to make reparations for genocide and dispossessing the Dakota people of their homeland. Among Waziyatawin’s proposals were taking down Fort Snelling and returning public lands to Minnesota’s original inhabitants, proposals so bold as to make Dr. Lenz “not certain how much she believes what she writes,” as she also explained to the class (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012).
Despite Dr. Lenz’s eventual stated dissatisfaction with Carley for its “datedness” (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012), this initial overview of the readings set an important frame that built implicit stability for a long-established white authority on the war and, by contrast, instability for a critical indigenous voice calling for restorative social justice today. As skepticism about Carley as a reliable source grew during the course, the idea of Waziyatawin’s unreliability only seemed to deepen; on the Friday preceding the discussion on What Does Justice Look Like?, Dr. Lenz reminded students that Waziyatawin was “the most radical of our authors. Some Dakota see her as really out there on the fringe” (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Delivered late in the day as part of instructions to students for how they should prepare for next week’s discussion, these words seemed to suggest that if Dakota people could be found who regarded Waziyatawin’s book as marginal, then why should this majority-white class position it anywhere near the center of their understanding of 1862?
This specific discursive frame—Carley’s balance and Waziyatawin’s imbalance—was a tenuous one to set and maintain. The 15 students enrolled did not reflect the proverbially ignorant masses often imagined by regional media when it comes to the topic of the U.S.-Dakota War.3 On the contrary, many of them brought critical orientations that felt aligned with Waziyatawin’s call for restorative justice. Although Dr. Lenz described the class to me in a follow-up interview as having “started essentially at zero” in terms of relevant prior knowledge (Interview, April 27, 2012), only four students reported never having completed coursework or read books by or about Native Americans prior to enrolling.4 On the other hand, ten reported having taken coursework that included critical perspectives on colonialism in North America, read critical works on the subject independently, or had relevant personal experiences like visiting reservations in North or South Dakota.
A good example of the students’ wealth of prior knowledge and Dr. Lenz’s awareness of it came on the first day of class. Just before introducing What Does Justice Look Like? to students, Dr. Lenz had called on Alan—the student taking the class to atone for what he suspected was his four-times-great grandfather’s killing of Dakota people in punitive expeditions into the Dakota Territory—asking him to share what he had learned from Waziyatawin after hearing her speak at the White Privilege Conference in Minneapolis the previous year. Alan explained that he had attended Waziyatawin’s session on decolonization and heard her tell the history of Fort Snelling and its strategic placement on ground sacred to the Dakota people (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). It was immediately after Alan’s brief remarks that Dr. Lenz proceeded to characterize the book as “radical” and “provocative,” but not in the way someone working consciously for social change might use these words; a negative or dubious sense for the terms quickly arose when Dr. Lenz added that she was “not certain how much she [Waziyatawin] really believes what she writes,” a comment directed at the author’s proposal to take down Fort Snelling and return the land surrounding it to the Dakota people (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). With this, Dr. Lenz suggested that she herself might be just as invested in preserving colonial institutions as she is in helping historically dispossessed people attain social justice. Dr. Lenz did not elaborate in an effort to dispel this ambiguity. Alan made no further comments. There was a great deal of ground to cover that first day and Dr. Lenz moved immediately on to introducing Sarah Wakefield’s book, Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees.
Like Alan, three other students had attended the White Privilege Conference in recent years and brought back with them a heightened consciousness about race and oppression. Of these three, Anna, a third-year Sociology/Anthropology major, reported having had overviews of the U.S.-Dakota War in her past education and of having read a history of the war plus Ella Deloria’s Waterlily, John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, and other works associated with a college-level Indigenous Peoples of North America course she had taken. Introduced in Chapter 2, Lori reported having spent time on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in her youth (Interview, January 23, 2012). She reported awareness on the first day of class that St. Lucia College had been founded the same year as an important date associated with the war and that the conflict involved President Lincoln ordering a mass execution of Dakotas.
Of the four White Privilege Conference attendees, only Jennifer reported knowing next to nothing about the war prior to enrolling in the course. Yet she possessed a wealth of prior critical knowledge about race and oppression that enabled her to speak with conviction about what she was learning. A highly accomplished second-year Communications Studies major who worked at the Diversity Center, Jennifer was editor-in-chief of the College newspaper and helped organize the College’s annual social-justice conference. Jennifer railed against the educational system the more she learned about the U.S.-Dakota War—“I think that there needs to be required- there needs to be something required within our educational system so that everyone is at least given, you know, a better understanding of what went on versus the feeling that I feel like I got nothing. In terms of Dakota and white-settler relations, I think that it was a genocide” (Interview, January 18, 2012). Jennifer shared this understanding two-and-a-half weeks into the course, making clear her anxiety that her developing view involved taking up a marginal position in relation to white authority. At this point, she had read Carley’s history, Anderson and Woolworth’s volume Through Dakota Eyes, and had recently attended the public lecture by Anderson where the author stated unequivocally that genocide never occurred in Minnesota. On her conviction about regional genocide, Jennifer worried, “I don’t know how many people are gonna, you know (.) agree with me. Some people aren’t. I know Gary Clayton Anderson certainly didn’t. Um, but in that regard, I came into the class being far more sympathetic to the Dakota experience simply because, uh, white history has been taught to me my whole life and this is the first time I’m even touching on it” (Interview, January 18, 2012). Like most of the students, Jennifer possessed prior awareness of colonialism, racism, and oppression that seemed to orient her favorably toward critical social justice.
Admittedly, prior knowledge the students reported as a whole about specific events surrounding the U.S.-Dakota War seemed mostly spotty and in some cases nonexistent, as in Jennifer’s remark that she had “got nothing,” but this only partially justifies the view that the students “started essentially at zero” in early January. Yet, on this score, even Dr. Lenz willingly took up the mantle of the ignorant citizen-scholar, describing herself as a “neophyte” when reflecting on the time when she first started planning the course with Harwell in 2009 (Interview, April 27, 2012). Accordingly, she positioned herself as a “learner” throughout the J-term, an identity she curiously retained months after the course ended (Fieldnotes, March 10, 2012) despite having taught on the Holocaust and other colonial contexts for 25 years (Interview, April 27, 2012). She had three books behind her on women’s experiences under Nazi oppression.
But even this implicit deference to the local “facts” and their ultimate preservation from critical interrogation could not support the imagined collective zero point of knowledge. Tom, the student from Hutchinson introduced in Chapter 2, knew very well that his hometown had been attacked and burned by Dakota fighters in 1862. As mentioned, he had taken a high-school course on the war and visited many battle sites in the region, something he felt gave him a unique perspective on the U.S.-Dakota War in contrast to students like Jennifer whom he felt was being overly critical—“she doesn’t know anything about this conflict at all until this last couple of weeks, and then since I’ve kind of learned about it my entire life, and I’ve gone to these places, and it’s part of my hometown’s heritage, and I’ve seen this thing that my town has as a resource” (Interview, January 9, 2012). Despite taking such conservative stances in one-on-one interviews, Tom often provided classroom commentaries on injustice that cut against the grain of whitestream calls for fairness and balance, as he did here when making sense out of why Dakotas attacked whites in 1862—“For me this is about accountability and fair treatment. The Dakota weren’t treated fairly anywhere, not in the stores. I don’t think the goal was so much about getting rid of whites but the bull crap that came with them” (Fieldnotes, January 23, 2012). In other instances, Tom spoke out for “truth-telling” and against racist double standards that shaped such things as the horrific public treatment of Tháoyateduta, the hypocritical lauding of Henry Sibley after the war, and the banning of Dakota spiritual practices until 1978 (Fieldnotes, January 23, 24, 2012). So, even this seemingly most conservative of students held orientations favorable toward critical social justice.
Mitch came to the course with similar prior knowledge to Tom’s though he rarely expressed Tom’s level of conservatism. Mitch was raised in Lake Okoboji, Iowa, near Spirit Lake where an important precursor to the U.S.-Dakota War took place in 1857 when a group of Wahpekute Dakota, led by Íŋkpaduta, killed approximately 40 settlers after white officials had failed to prosecute trader Henry Lott for massacring chief Siŋtómniduta and his family (Wingerd, 2010, pp. 260–265). Mitch expressed awareness and sympathy for historical grievances expressed by Dakotas. Like Tom, he came from a farming family. He had visited Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota as a boy and understood that this primary place Minnesota officials violently evicted Dakota non-combatants to in 1863 was land on which “you can’t do anything” in terms of food production (Interview, January 26, 2012). Mitch shared first-hand knowledge of celebratory modes of white commemoration in northwest Iowa, an area he characterized as “a very conservative, very racist place” (Focus group, January 13, 2012). He opposed local school mascots like the Lake Okoboji Pioneers and Spirit Lake Indians, especially “the Indians” which meant white students draping themselves in the color red (Focus group, January 13, 2012). What concerned Mitch most was the feeling that no one there seemed to see anything wrong in appropriating “Indian” identity to build school community—“there’s not been really any serious talk about changing it. People aren’t really concerned about it” (Focus group, January 13, 2012).
You know, I don’t know. If we didn’t have the object passing thing going on I think it would be a pretty explosive- (1.0) everyone would be talking at once cause we’re all kinda pissed (1.0) thing. I don’t know. I feel like as usual Steven is gonna be like, °whoa° he’s all pissed and he’s gonna be like, °okay°. The- the object passing takes a lot of the heat out of it (2.0) so there’s gonna be a lot of lengthy silence. (Interview, January 24, 2012)
In this interview, Stephanie had just spoken of ways she was pissed after working all month on the “War — Dakota perspectives” exhibit panel. As alluded to in Chapter 2, she strongly expected Dakota viewers to get upset over the kind of knowledge Mr. Harwell had been guiding her and Tom to produce together—whites giving “Dakota perspective” and focusing on military strategy and prominent men like Tháoyateduta rather than on everyday Dakota people affected by war, or as Stephanie put it, the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dead, sick children and women that aren’t even mentioned” (Interview, January 24, 2012). By claiming “we’re all kinda pissed,” and then thinking specifically of Steven, another well-informed J-termer,5 Stephanie noted a point of critical solidarity within a larger group of classmates she imagined as potentially “explosive” with disagreement over Waziyatawin’s book. In focus-group discussion the previous Friday, Steven had gone so far as to say “I hope some people get pissed” by the museum exhibit for its overall potential to be perceived as one sided, favoring a Dakota perspective long silenced in regional commemoration (Focus group, January 20, 2012). Meanwhile Stephanie’s co-author, Tom, had been advocating for “balance” in the panels. In group discussions late in the course, Steven mentioned a need for activism regarding public commemoration (Focus group, January 13, 2012). Imagining Steven’s critical voice unleashed, then, amidst controversial reaction to What Does Justice Look Like? seemed to raise a powerful vision of white disunity for Stephanie where Steven would pause in a calm-before-the-storm moment of °whoa° to assess other “pissed” voices before proceeding to resist from his determined °okay° position on the other.
Passing the Wreath: Round One
Visions of open controversy in the J-term classroom remained just that, visions. Students were overwhelmingly respectful and class discussions were shot through with polite decorum. In the first round of the wreath-passing discussion on January 24 reconstructed below from expanded fieldnotes, I managed to capture eight instances of respectful affirmations prefacing what the 15 speakers had to say, discourse suggestive perhaps of the nativistic ceremonial frame on the one hand but of the tone of mutual respect always in play in J-term settings. “I really like Jennifer’s comment,” “I really agree with what Alan said,” “I wanted to say what Sarah did,” all came from this first round of fourteen speech acts, as did affirmations about the course—“This is what I love about college courses,” “I’m excited to go back [to Fort Snelling] now”—and respect for Waziyatawin—“I really respected her arguments,” “I respected and agreed with a lot of what she had to say,” “I appreciated the firm stance she took.”
Prefacing all these utterances, however, was an initial reluctance to speak at all. J-termers sometimes needed prodding as they did on this day after Dr. Lenz read the first wreath-passing prompt—“What is your reaction to Waziyatawin’s recommendations for justice?”
Dr. Lenz waited. When no one moved to take the wreath, she joked, “Hello? Coffee anyone?”
Stephanie soon motioned. She took the wreath and spoke briefly about difficulties that would be involved in taking down Fort Snelling and returning land to the Dakota. “How on earth could we get that to happen?” she asked.
Jennifer spoke next, also briefly, supporting the authoritative classroom position toward What Does Justice Look Like? set on the first day but also making a move to distance herself from it—“This is what I love about college classes, well partially college and partially St. Lucia. We get the chance to read really polarized texts like this. It’s radical although I don’t really like that word. This has been really cool for me to read, and I think from all the texts you can find middle ground.”
Jennifer often applied the term “radical” to herself in a positive way when taking positions advocating for social justice. In a focus-group discussion attended by seven of her classmates four days earlier, Jennifer had taken a bold stance against Gary Clayton Anderson’s assertion that white Minnesotans may have once carried ethnic cleansing out against the Dakota but definitely not genocide. Jennifer railed—“I think it’s a cop out to call it ethnic cleansing. I’m sorry. I’m- I’m just- I’m gonna just- I’m gonna be the radical one here and I’m just gonna say it’s- its a cop out” (Focus group, January 20, 2012). Regarding whether white audience members should ever question anything Dakota speakers had to say during the J-term, Jennifer proclaimed in the same focus group, “I’m gonna be firm and radical here but I’m gonna just say this because I need to say it, white people need to shut the hell up and sit there and listen” (Focus group, January 20, 2012). In our first interview two days before that, Jennifer had described herself with pride, saying, “I’m far more of a radical than I think that you’re gonna talk to anyone” (Interview, January 18, 2012). If given the chance to fashion a museum-exhibit panel unedited by the instructors, she claimed, “I think that I would make far more radical pronouncements about what was going on” (Interview, January 18, 2012).
For Jennifer, claiming not to like the word radical in her first contribution to the wreath-passing discussion suggested, then, not liking its use by Dr. Lenz as a way of destabilizing What Does Justice Look Like? as a source for students. Yet, expressing distaste toward the authoritative classroom iteration of “radical” implied critiquing an unacknowledged bias in the teaching, a slightly risky move for Jennifer. Seen above, after carefully slipping the critique in, Jennifer seemed to try to give something back with her final remark about “middle ground,” reaffirming Dr. Lenz’s advocacy on the first day for a “fairly balanced perspective, which is what we’re looking for.”
Christina spoke next. The only non-white student among the 15, Christina seized the opportunity provided by the ceremonial frame to offer a kind of confession vis-à-vis Waziyatawin—“Even though she mentions the impossibility of her goals or ideas, I think what she’s saying is really important. It’s been hard for me to position myself in this class. I’m Mexican, and my family comes from Mexico. I see what she means when she writes these things. Even though her suggestions may be impossible, I rally for her.” With three days left in the J-term, this was the first time Christina, a third-year student majoring in Communication Arts and English Education, had brought her non-white identity to bear on group discussion.
When I had asked Christina four days earlier about her ancestry and how she felt with frequent talk about white privilege going on in the course, she told me—“That’s a good question. I haven’t thought about- (.) um, a little. Uh, cause like there’s comments sometimes in class, like we’re just a bunch of white people, and I- sometimes I’m like, ‘No I’m not’” (Interview, January 20, 2012). She had kept her no-I’m-nots to herself until this final day of whole-class discussion. For Christina, seeing what Waziyatawin means yet sensing an “impossibility” in her goals seemed less a response to what the author had actually written and more a personal response to the normative racial identity that prevailed during the J-term. Normative whiteness had made minoritized positioning “hard.” Though self-consciously white and critical toward violence carried out by whites in the past, majority J-termers had few opportunities in the fast-paced class to examine the politics of race unfolding before them be it in classroom discussions, public lectures, or various exchanges with members of the community. Not unpacking the current politics of race on 1862 or working actively to find strategies for disrupting white resistance to social-justice education could lead to expressions of helplessness, as in Stephanie’s opening statement above—“How on earth could we get that to happen?”—and Christina’s sense of “impossibility.” For Christina, locating and voicing her minoritized racial position in these final days of the course meant acknowledging even more barriers between her and her classmates as she told me in interview—“if I was going to be on one side, I wouldn’t be- you know, back then, it would not- I wouldn’t have been on the white side because it’s not my skin color and beliefs and everything” (Interview, January 20, 2012).
A series of defensive comments about What Does Justice Look Like? followed Christina’s confession of rallying for Waziyatawin from a minoritized perspective. Holly took the wreath next and said she appreciated Waziyatawin’s boldness but the writing reminded her of the saying “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Tom extended this thinking, saying, “the solution seems to be for whites to go east, get in boats and sail home.” Mitch expressed confusion about Waziyatawin’s proposal for land cessions, invoked his father’s occupation as a farmer, and added that he didn’t think his father would like to lose his job. Anna echoed Tom’s concerns, saying, “If we give land back, where do we go?”
The next speaker, Lori, slowed things down. The Baha’i spiritualist, Lori savored her turn by holding the wreath up to her nose, closing her eyes, and taking in the scent. “Sweetgrass is my favorite,” she said, a performative move that made a clear appeal to the ceremonial frame. She said she respected what Waziyatawin had to say and read a passage from the bottom half of page 174 where the author makes clear that she is not pushing an eye-for-an-eye agenda—“Those of us clinging to traditional Dakota values are not interested in turning the tables and claiming a position as oppressor, as colonizer, or of ruthlessly exploiting the environment for profit.” After reading, Lori continued to work against the distorted collective view of What Does Justice Look Like? strengthened by the previous speakers’ defense of white property—“She says she doesn’t want to return to the conditions that set this up. She doesn’t want to turn into that which caused pain in the first place.” Lori handed the sweetgrass over to Dr. Lenz, just past the midway point of the wreath’s first circuit.
Dr. Lenz sent it further on without comment.
In the wake of Lori’s intervention, the next four speakers made sure to note that they either respected Waziyatawin’s proposals or agreed with something a previous speaker had said. The first to go, Alan, the one working for atonement, followed a thread introduced by Lori—“Oppression affects the oppressor too. It robs you of your humanity. I think Fort Snelling should go away. I think the land should go back to the Dakota. A symbolic act like that would rile things up, but in a positive way. It would create the opportunity for discussion. It’s wrong to just do nothing.” Next, Sarah re-inserted a notion of balance to the discussion, stating that this is “a double-sided history.” Still, she thought, the names of nineteenth-century colonizers like Alexander Ramsey and Henry Sibley should be removed from public places. Steven then politely challenged Sarah’s assertion of balance. He granted that “settler society is so massive” that it would be impossible to remove, yet he added, “it’s important to take a stand and push the envelope, maybe to the point where there’s no middle ground.” Next to go, Monica, agreed—“This is meant to be a dialogue for change. You have to push the envelope drastically for the smallest change to take place.” The last two speakers, Rachel and Tracy, both returned to the idea of Waziyatawin herself being “extreme.” Only Rachel granted that “what she says has to be said for change.”
When Rachel wrapped up this first round, it looked for a moment as if Dr. Lenz was not going to share her own reactions to Waziyatawin’s recommendations for justice. Passing the wreath silently on had marked a barrier between student and teacher, suggesting that it was not the teacher’s place to share “reaction,” only to provide occasion for it for students, a contradiction considering her self-proclaimed status as a fellow “learner.” When Dr. Lenz began to speak in the direction of her purpose for follow-up discussion—analyzing narrative strategies employed by Waziyatawin—Steven held a shrug of his shoulders and looked around the circle as if to ask, “What gives?”
Students prodded Dr. Lenz to share. She explained herself as having a currently “evolving” understanding of What Does Justice Look Like? At first, she said, she “thought it was so extreme she figured the author was just going for a reaction,” but after speaking with a scholar more familiar with Waziyatawin’s work, she came to understand that the author “was dead serious about returning Minnesota state park land to the Dakota” and eliminating Fort Snelling. After considering Waziyatawin’s proposals in light of her personal knowledge of truth and reconciliation in South Africa and her experiences visiting concentration camps in Germany, Dr. Lenz was now “much more amenable to her idea because it [Fort Snelling] was built on sacred land. The concentration camps weren’t,” she explained. “I’m shifting my thinking.” She was careful to qualify this shift however—“Still historic places are really important. Eradicating them can be a form of genocide too. It depends on how they’re telling the history there.”
This first and strangely late-coming reference to genocide since the wreath set in motion emphasizes another important way this discussion was framed in the interest of producing a certain kind of script, the latter term again meaning the things that eventually get said and how they get said (Fairclough, 2001, p. 132). As a frame, the discussion prompt “What is your reaction to Waziyatawin’s recommendations for justice?” elicited script mainly attending to Minnesota’s future as Waziyatawin proposes it—whether or not Fort Snelling should be razed, whether Sibley and Ramsey’s names should be erased from public places, etc.—and not the state’s past as she proposes it in the book’s first seventy pages, that is, as one of genocide. What students actually thought about this, whether or not they agreed that this was a history of genocide, whether the instructor really took issue and why, all remained undisclosed. White denial of regional genocide had been lingering since historian Gary Clayton Anderson’s visit to St. Lucia College two weeks earlier. Though students had brought the question up on various occasions since then, Anderson’s argument that this was not genocide had not been examined in whole-group discussion.6 With the second prompt, Dr. Lenz had developed for this last day of discussion—“What suggestion [for justice] would you make different from Waziyatawin’s?”—it looked as if the ways that genocide in Dakota homeland had been politicized would remain beyond J-term classroom scripts.
Expanding the Thesis
I introduce and return to the concept of discursive frames to demonstrate how frames can work as tools to set the conditions for certain ways of speaking and interacting. In the wreath-passing session above, certain utterances mediated meaning within the “balance/imbalance” frame, others within the “ceremonial frame,” others the “recommendations” frame, and so on. For the students, these frames were initiated from the site of authority, Dr. Lenz, but a site also implicating extra-institutional points of authority like the Star Tribune, BLCHS, and politicians calling on the phone. Once initiated, the students all did their own discursive work individually and collectively to negotiate meaning within the frames, sometimes affirming them, sometimes questioning them, and sometimes even contesting them, however subtly.
Like all tools, frames are put to use for specific purposes. When those purposes affect historically colonized people seeking things like healing, reconciliation, restorative justice, and decolonization as many Dakotas are today, the frames shaping public understanding need to be examined carefully with moral judgment.
As discussed, discursive frames can serve the purpose of privileging certain forms of knowledge over others, making some knowledge rise to the level of becoming most “appropriate” or even “official” while cutting other forms of knowledge out altogether. With frames as powerful as “balance” or “healing” established in advance of the wreath-passing session, various forms of talk were made to feel appropriate or inappropriate, balanced or imbalanced for those sitting in the circle. Such etiquette indicates that politics were in play, politics in the sense of struggle over social goods (Gee, 2011). In the case of Jennifer who wanted to do well in the course, challenging the balance frame by casting doubt on Dr. Lenz’s use of the term “radical” implied risking her position as a successful student (a social good) working for a high grade (another social good). To maintain the perception of her success—for Dr. Lenz indeed considered her “a tremendous student” (Interview, January 12, 2012)—Jennifer evoked “middle ground” when pushing back, a sensible political move for her.
In the course of establishing certain frames for classroom discussion, Dr. Lenz revealed her own political striving in relation to authority located beyond the College walls. By starting the class session reading from the Star Tribune column and then suggesting to students that the course was helping to bridge the Dakota/white divide, she constructed the balanced work of the J-term as most appropriate for the statewide context. All such references to positive publicity for the high-profile course indicate engagement of a public pedagogy most likely to deliver the desired social goods not just for relatively empowered whites like Lenz and Harwell but for their respective institutions, St. Lucia College and BLCHS. Yet, maintaining balance—a key dominant discourse in the region’s white public pedagogy—still could feel like delicate work in this politically contentious public arena, as Anna’s observation from early in this chapter suggests—“they have to like be so careful of the wording in what they present because they don’t want to like lose funding and piss anybody off” (Interview, January 27, 2012).
Conclusion
Comparing the different levels of discursive political work Jennifer and Dr. Lenz were both performing brings me back to my initial use of the term frame in reference to contextual levels, e.g., national, state, regional, community, college, and classroom. As linguist James Gee (2011) explains, the question of where to draw the boundaries for analysis can pose a “frame problem” for researchers (pp. 67–68). This book’s solution is to take up the regional frame established by Dr. Lenz’s reading from Sturdevant’s Star Tribune column, that is, the fearful position of the public educator allegedly caught between warring sides in southern Minnesota, a figure who needs the wish of “good luck” before trying to say something about the U.S.-Dakota War, but who would probably be better off not saying anything at all, a message that certainly had its effect on Dr. Lenz. This book connects classroom politics to the larger white politics of race regarding the U.S.-Dakota War, asking questions such as what social goods are at stake when “balance” is evoked and how “objective” and “neutral” positions politicize the legacy of 1862, “justifying” to whites what is objectively unjustifiable.
Crucially for all that follows, the normative public educator of the U.S.-Dakota War that Sturdevant’s column imagines as caught between “sides” is not just anyone, but a speaker occupying a privileged position for producing knowledge—first the Star Tribune writer, second the public historian working for the Minnesota Historical Society, then “anyone else planning to publicly commemorate this year’s sad sesquicentennial.” Civic leaders, schoolteachers, regional journalists all come quickly to mind as do professors like Dr. Lenz and county historical society directors like Mr. Harwell. Sturdevant’s message pertains foremost to professionals working within historically white institutions who have the ability and means to frame and orchestrate public acts of commemoration. While the history may be “too formative to ignore” for these kinds of Minnesotans, as Sturdevant writes, the idea of ignoring it is still there. Sturdevant is not an angry e-mail writer embroiled in the ongoing legacy of the war, only one who receives messages from such people and might just as well delete them. While it might sound reasonably safe to say her empowered public commemorator is likely not a descendant of white settlers killed in 1862, it is an even safer thing to say her commemorator is not a descendant of Dakota people killed or violently “removed” after 1862. Her imagined public educator is most decidedly not among voices calling for cultural revitalization or restorative justice heard today in works like In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century (2006) or the film Dakota 38 (2012)—people evoking 1862 and journeying back to painful places like Mankato and Fort Snelling in efforts to transcend the deleterious effects of racial segregation and white supremacy.
As imagined, the default planner of public acts of commemoration in Minnesota has apparently not felt the adverse effects of colonization and can resign such perspective to one “side,” perhaps even set it aside, crop it out of the frame. Ostensibly caught between sides but implicitly aligned with institutions that historically benefit from settler colonialism,7 this public educator—the generic white non-descendant untouched by war—can afford to take positions commonly thought of as appropriate and professional when speaking, positions commonly understood as “reasonable” middle grounds between extreme sides and thus deemed balanced, neutral, and objective because of it. But in keeping with a long line of criticism that examines the politics and pedagogy of objectivist stances (Freire, 2010; Giroux, 2000; Said, 1994)—criticism crystallized in Bishop Tutu’s dictum, if you are neutral on situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor—this book examines “neutrality,” “objectivity,” “fairness,” and “balance” as discursive frames for oppressive scripts that compel whites to assume highly naturalized positions of fairness toward fellow whites, past and present, reconstructing painful racial divides in the process.
As the remainder of this book argues, in regional iterations of white justice as fairness surrounding the U.S.-Dakota War, the dominant discourses just listed provide white educators an assortment of reliable yet decidedly partial discursive tools to use when carrying out public commemorative transactions with fellow whites over 1862. Of course, such discourses are not limited to the context in question; balance, neutrality, and objectivity have long been identified as widespread and powerful for their efficiency in masking conservative and neoliberal political agendas (Giroux, 2000), notorious examples being, of course, Fox News’s “fair and balanced” approach to the news and Donald Trump’s “balanced” comments finding “very fine people on both sides” of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
As Dr. Lenz accurately suggested the first day of class, balance, as regionally expressed, is to be located exclusively in traditional white sources like Kenneth Carley’s history. Rather than being constructed by synthesizing information somewhere in the middle of “sides” or even by simply making meaning after consulting a variety of Native and white sources, balance as a frame discourse in white communities like Gotland and Mankato is best achieved by digging further into foundational white sources from which Carley’s history derives, a dynamic explored in Chapter 6. In tracing this regional tradition which often goes into graphic, sensationalized detail about macabre atrocities allegedly committed against whites—what historian Peter Silver (2008) terms the anti-Indian sublime—a raced sense of white justice as fairness emerges with roots reaching back to settler society’s original racial contract.
- 1.
Dr. Lenz shared this email with me from January 10, 2012, during our final interview on April 27, 2012.
- 2.
Lecture surveys were devised by course instructors and placed on chairs prior to each of the six lectures. By the morning of January 24, four lectures had taken place, the largest audience estimated at over 260 people not counting approximately 30 others who had followed via online streaming (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012). In all, 50 completed surveys had been collected by the date in question and shared with me, none containing negative reactions like those alluded to above. The anonymous surveys provided ample space for audience members to write their opinions.
- 3.
A Mankato Free Press editorial column printed during the J-term course began, “The lack of public knowledge about the Dakota-U.S. War is remarkable. Go outside Minnesota and there is scant if any awareness of the bloody, historic events that took place on the southern Minnesota plains in 1862. Even in the state, comprehension of the war is generally limited” (“Dakota-U.S. War history,” January 10, 2012). Similarly, the TPT production The Past is Alive within Us begins with the claim of widespread ignorance. See, http://www.tpt.org/?a=tptUpdate&id=1867.
- 4.
My discussion of students’ prior knowledge begins with data collected by course instructors on the first day of class and eventually shared with me. These data were generated through a “Pre-Test” consisting of 5 questions asking students about their prior knowledge of American-Indian history, the U.S.-Dakota War specifically, their prior experiences with American Indians, and their personal ancestry.
- 5.
Steven was a third-year Anthropology major who had completed coursework at St. Lucia on Indigenous Peoples of North America (Interview, January 12, 2012). He showed considerable interest in Native history and spirituality and had been reading independently beyond the assigned works, recently finishing Mary Wingerd’s North Country: The Making of Minnesota (2010) which he brought to class and consulted in his exhibit-writing work.
- 6.
Students brought the politics of genocide up on various occasions in class discussions planned for other subjects. On the first class meeting after Anderson’s lecture, Harwell led discussion on the day’s assigned reading by Kenneth Carley (1976), focusing on whether “war” is the appropriate term to use regarding local battles in 1862. Early in the discussion Holly said, “Anderson talked about the line between war and genocide being blurry. When Ramsey talked of ‘extermination,’ was that then genocide?” Harwell answered, “I really want to come back to that. So, what’s war?” When Harwell failed to return to the topic, Jennifer brought it up again late in the session, with less than five minutes remaining. “Why doesn’t Anderson call it a genocide?” she asked. Harwell restated the argument Anderson made, that white officials exercised “restraint” in their treatment of Dakotas following the battles of 1862. As to her inclination to call the history a genocide, Dr. Lenz then said, “I’m still making up my mind. I’m closer to it than I was before.” She referred to herself as someone who had studied genocide for a long time, adding “I don’t think there’s such a fine line between genocide and ethnic cleansing.” She went on to make some statements about the politics of the Armenian genocide without going further into definitions or the regional white politics (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012). Discussion of the distinction Anderson made or why he might have made it never went deeper than this in classroom discussion. The local politicization of genocide came up once more after a talk delivered by local historian John LaBatte at BLCHS’s annual meeting held Sunday, January 22, 2012, on the St. Lucia campus. In anticipation of the event, Harwell told the class that LaBatte was “vehemently opposed to the idea of genocide” when referring to 1860s Minnesota (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012). The day after LaBatte’s talk, Mitch said in class, “I thought it was interesting about the distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing not being talked about.” Harwell said LaBatte’s “response is that you can call it whatever you want to” (Fieldnotes, January 23, 2012). The subject was then dropped. As Dr. Lenz told me when looking back over the course, “I so profoundly disagreed with his [Anderson’s] definition of what was and wasn’t genocide that I kind of wrote it off after that” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Comprehensive analysis of Anderson’s speech and thesis can be found in Chapter 5.
- 7.
The most straightforward setting of the state-level balance frame by a historically privileged colonial institution came in 2012 when the Minnesota Historical Society worked to construct a “balanced” exhibit for the sesquicentennial year as reported by Joel Picardi in a story for Minnesota Public Radio News titled “Finding balanced view of the US-Dakota War of 1862” (Picardi, 2012). In the TPT production The Past Is Alive Within Us, both Stephen Elliott, Director of the Minnesota Historical Society, and Daniel Spock, Director of the Minnesota History Center Museum in St. Paul, speak openly about their institution’s roots in a regional settler colonialism that constructed white wealth and prestige by exploiting Dakota Indians. Spock, for example, states, “When you look at the history of our particular organization, you realize just how complicated our role as an organization has been. Our founders are the same men who negotiated the treaties. They are the same men who benefited financially from those transactions. Our organization is founded by these men in part to, you know, memorialize their achievements.” See The Past Is Alive Within Us: The US-Dakota Conflict (1:19:58).